Broad Art Museum Façade by Zahner

A. Zahner Company is not as familiar a name as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, or Rafael Moneo, but these and other well-known architects can thank the company for helping to realize some of the most iconic metal-and-glass architecture of this century. A few notable examples include 41 Cooper Square in New York City by Morphosis, the de Young Museum in San Francisco by Herzog & de Meuron, the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago by Frank Gehry, and now the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University(East Lansing) by Zaha Hadid. The recently completed building covered in tapering diagonals of ridged stainless steel is an excellent example of how Zahner is able to engineer and craft metals into forms dreamt by architects and modeled in computers.

To realize Hadid's design as she modeled and rendered it, Kansas City, Missouri-based Zahner had to create a custom mill to make V-shaped cuts into the accordion folds that make up most of the exterior. Details were engineered in CAD and the stainless steel was produced at Zahner's Dallas factory, where it was finished with the company's Angel Hair™ Surface. Machinery patented by Zahner etches the stainless steel to cut down on glare and hot spots, creating what they assert is "the finest, smoothest, and most uniform light-diffusion metal surface available in the world." They further offer an anti-fingerprint coating, which is particularly important given how the building begs people to touch its pleats.